And It Was Night

“So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.” (John 13:30)

At the Maundy Thursday service last night at my parish, our visiting Quaker (because we have a visiting Quaker for Holy Week this year, which has been a fascinating experience in and of itself) gave the sermon, and talked about what the Last Supper, and indeed all of Holy Week, might have felt like for the disciples. Intense. Unsettling. Confusing.

I, of course, like all of you, know the end of the Easter story; I think I likely knew the end, the Resurrection, before I knew the beginning or the middle of the narrative. And that knowledge of what is to come inevitably shapes our perspective on the rest of the events. But the sermon called our attention to the fact that for those who were having these experiences, they didn’t know how it would turn out. The disciples at the Last Supper didn’t know it was the last. And they were likely rather confused as to why Jesus was adding an unfamiliar ritual to the meal, instructing them to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him.

I absolutely love the end of the Maundy Thursday service at my church. They strip the altar—carry out all the decorations from the sanctuary—while soloists from the choir sing lines from Psalm 22 (which begins “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) And then they turn off a lot of the lights, and we quietly sing some Taize (“Stay with me/remain here with me/watch and pray/watch and pray”). And then we leave in silence. It is powerful. It is haunting. I was thinking yesterday evening, Jesus is getting killed tomorrow, and I could feel the heaviness of that. And the poignancy of the footwashing in light of it.

And then I thought, but the disciples didn’t know that. They didn’t know where the story was going. How would they have made sense of Good Friday? Wouldn’t it have seemed to them like an utter failure of their movement? Wouldn’t it have felt like God had betrayed them? There was no miraculous last-minute divine intervention. The execution of Jesus was carried out. And even Jesus on the cross, quoting the above-mentioned psalm, lamented God’s absence.

On top of that, some of the disciples were confronted with their own frailty. They didn’t all stick by Jesus when the going got tough. He asked them to stay awake and watch, and they fell asleep. And then Peter denied him three times. What do you do when the thing you thought you were building comes crashing down, and you have to also grapple with the painful realization that you aren’t living up to your own ideals and commitments? What do you hold on to?

We know where this is going. We know how it will work out. There’s a way in which it all feels a little quick to me, to be honest. Everything is fixed a mere two days later. Every year during Holy Week, a part of me feels like Easter arrives too soon. I want the period of darkness and mourning to last longer. Because sometimes in life, it feels like it’s just one Good Friday after another, and Easter feels so far away as to be imaginable. I believe in the power of Easter, in the transforming possibilities of grace, but I am painfully aware that it can be a very long process to get there, and that miraculous reversals are rare.

So I’m glad to have this time of reflection, this liturgical period of pausing for a little while in grief and darkness. Of reading a narrative in which things completely fall apart, and letting yourself feel the enormity of that, of just how much brokenness there is in the world and in all of us. When we read the Passion story on Good Friday, it ends with Jesus in the tomb. We leave the church in silence. We go out into the night.